Shadows (Black Raven Book 1)

by Barcelona, Stella

  “His end objective. What exactly is it that your father wants you to do?” He was leaning towards her, his manner calm, his voice determined. “He sent you a signal yesterday morning, which had you running to the lake house. He was going to send you another signal at the lake house. Because the phone on which he was going to send the signal is gone, we have no idea what message was left, or what instructions you were to follow. Or, frankly, if he was capable of sending anything at all. With what I’ve learned about your father, he’s a man who leaves nothing to chance. In the event that one or more of these messages was lost, stolen, or you couldn’t make it to the location in time—what were your instructions?”

  She drew a deep breath. Even after telling Sebastian about the backup data at the lake house and in Charlotte, she hadn’t considered how she was going to tell him the rest of the story. Now, he was going to know the depth of her father’s paranoia, and he was going to think she was crazy for going along with it, but she had no choice but to tell him. “In Tennessee,” she paused, “the signal could have been that the cataclysm scenario was over. If that had been the case, Spring and I would have just gone home, to Covington. To our bakery,” her eyes welled with tears, “to our life.” She drew a deep breath, saw sympathy in his eyes, almost started crying in earnest, and shook her head. “Please don’t look at me like that. I’d prefer for you just to be a hard ass.”

  He chuckled. One of the other agents in the room did as well, and her cheeks burned with embarrassment. She’d forgotten anyone else was there but Sebastian. She looked around the jet and realized that the four agents were riveted, their eyes on the two of them, as though they were the best show at the circus.

  “Well,” Sebastian said, anchoring her with his calm manner, his words commanding her attention, “we know that if he was able to send a message to Tennessee, he wasn’t going to say that it was over. Cataclysm has to be tied to the prison break, and we don’t have him. So it isn’t over.”

  “Another option is that he could have told me to secure the backup and wait.”

  “Is the backup we’re looking for in Charlotte a duplicate of what was in the lake house?”

  She nodded.

  “So if he had told you to secure the backup, you, Candy, and Spring, were going to have to get to Charlotte?”

  She nodded. “Even if he didn’t tell me to secure the backup, I was going to have to go to Charlotte, if the cataclysm scenario remained in play.”

  “Why?”

  “To await his next message.”

  “Then what?”

  She drew a deep breath, trying to escape his razor sharp attention. She shook her head, careful not to let her panic reflect in her face. It was time to tell him the ending. Oh dear God, help me. “What do you mean?”

  “If you would have gotten to Charlotte, and the cataclysm scenario was still in play, what were you supposed to do?”

  The only sounds that registered were her heartbeat and his breathing.

  When she looked down, he used his index finger to lift her chin.

  “Skye? Stay with me. I need to know this,” he paused and gave her a slight headshake. “We need to know this. Ragno and Zeus are listening, and they’re hanging on every word that you say.”

  For a second she felt foolish, suddenly aware that his leaning into her was so that the people to whom he was tethered through the mic could hear, and not about any feelings for her. But in that moment, he tightened his grip on her hands, bending towards her ear, and said, “You’re doing great.” His lips grazed her ear as he whispered, his tone reassuring, “Thank you.”

  She drew a deep breath. The huskiness in his voice had nothing to do with what she was saying, or the questions he was asking. The look in his eyes, that encouraging look that was at once soft and very, very hungry, had nothing to do with cataclysm, Shadows, or the LID. It had everything to do with how he reacted to her, that inexplicable thing that led him over a line that he had never before crossed. She knew it, even if he didn’t.

  And even if he was only manipulating her, she had no choice. She still had to fulfill her father’s directive, and without Sebastian, she had no hope of doing it. “If the cataclysm scenario is still in play, I’m supposed to alert the authorities that the data collected by the United States is insecure, and I’m supposed to do that by going to the top of the intelligence hierarchy. If someone breaks through the LID, they have Shadow Technology, and they have access to all the data that the government has collected. Everything in PRISM, everything in any mass data collection program, because Shadow Technology integrates and assimilates the programs and data.”

  Sebastian nodded. “So your father claimed.”

  “With my father’s backup for LID Technology, you’ll have no doubt that Shadow Technology exists. You’ll be in the system. Manipulating it. You’ll not only have access to all the data the government is collecting, you’ll be able to implement anything you want Shadow Technology to do. So if cataclysm is still in play, I’m supposed to bring the authorities the backup data, which contains the codes for closing the back door access.”

  He pressed his finger to his ear. “Ragno. Zeus. Slow down. Ask one question at a time.”

  He studied Skye as he listened. “The backup. Is it complete?”

  Please, Dad, forgive me.

  She shook her head. “There are dead ends built into it. There are prompts that require input. Passwords. I can figure my way around most of it.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “What kind of input?”

  “Some words. Mostly numbers. It’s complicated and formulated through a system of words and the words lead to prime numbers. Code-cracking programs won’t provide the answers, even sophisticated programs that can make trillions of guesses per minute. The words that lead to the numbers are prompted by colors and the names of the colors make no sense in the real world.”

  Sebastian’s eyes widened as he stared at her. Surprise turned to a hard, assessing look, as though he knew what she wasn’t saying. She was giving him an answer without saying the actual words. She wasn’t the sister with the phenomenal memory for meaningless words to describe colors and correlating streams of numbers.

  He knew everything about her and Spring, and he should know that as well. Each dead end was actually a color. Her father used colors as markers for code, and he did that by translating colors to words to numbers. Those numbers formed the codes. It was too random for anyone with a normal memory to memorize, and her father never reduced it to writing. There was no way she was going to tell Sebastian those details while he wore a mic, with others listening to every word. There were limits to her trust.

  He was a smart man. After a long silence, he nodded.

  That secret, the one neither of them voiced, had to be protected at all costs.

  Ragno and Zeus knew enough. They didn’t need to know the rest. She held her breath, praying Sebastian wouldn’t verbalize what he had just figured out – that Spring was part of the key to the incomplete data set in her father’s backup.

  He turned, looked at the other agents, and said, “Alert the pilot. We’re headed back to Last Resort. I’m not sure where this road is taking us, but I want the sisters together. Zeus, you and your team have Firefly Island?” He paused. “Good. Give the marshals minimal information. Not the whole picture. Just enough so that later we can claim we didn’t knowingly obfuscate the truth.”

  “Your father does things in threes.” Sebastian shot her a questioning glance. “Is there a third set of backup?”

  “Zachary Young had a version of it, but his was an earlier version. My father was never able to figure out what Zachary did with it, or whether he did anything at all. When Zachary and his family were killed, my father assumed that someone had the backup. The problem isn’t that someone has the backup. You see,” she paused, “the problem is that someone is making sense of it. That’s what set the cataclysm scenario in play.”

  “Assuming your father’s cataclysm scenario is still i
n play, who exactly are you supposed to take this information to? The National Security Agency? CIA? FBI?”

  She hesitated, not ready to voice the answer.

  “Well? The end game. I need to know your father’s end game.”

  Oh, dear God. Help me. “I’m supposed to get to Washington. Straight to the President.”

  She waited for disbelief. She waited for him to lose his cool. It was outlandish, she knew, but in her father’s world, it all made perfect sense. The leap of faith into that world, though, was going to be a big one for this man who was so grounded in reality.

  Instead of disbelief, he gave her a quizzical look, and asked, “Of?”

  “What do you mean, of?”

  “The President of what?”

  “Of the United States.”

  Chapter Twenty One

  The President of the United States?

  Of course.

  All great conspiracy theories ended in the Oval Office.

  Why should this one—born of one of the more brilliant minds of the century— be any different?

  Skye had cringed as she said it, and he didn’t blame her. Her pronouncement prompted his brain to flood with more smartass comments than he could voice and an equal number of questions. All of which coalesced into silence, as he had backed away from her, because he couldn’t think of a goddamn thing to say. A long minute passed, when he and his agents did nothing but stare at her. She stood, glanced at him with a look of despair, and walked to the back of the jet, taking the same seat in the rear cabin she’d occupied on the way there.

  He glanced at the pilots. “Let’s return to Last Resort.”

  One of them nodded. “We’re on the leading edge of a cold front. Gusty winds. There might be a bit of a weather delay.”

  Sebastian stayed in the front of the plane with his agents, none of whom were saying a thing. Like children who were waiting for a parent to explode, they were eyeing him, waiting for his reaction to Skye’s pronouncement that she was supposed to go to the Oval Office.

  Sinking heavily into a seat, he stretched his legs into the aisle. He reached into a jacket pocket, opened a pill bottle, and took a pill that seemed to affect him more mildly than some of his others. He needed to take the edge off the headache. Popular thought in the Black Raven ranks was that there wasn’t enough blood in a man’s body to fuel both his dick and his brain at the same time. On him, at the moment, his head was pounding, and his balls were aching, because encouraging Skye to speak, leaning into her, holding her, and comforting her, had prompted another bout of unsatisfied arousal, and his body was rebelling. The dual areas of throbbing pain proved that while his dick and brain might not function effectively at the same time, the two certainly could hurt simultaneously.

  Zeus and Ragno had heard every word and so far their radio silence was deafening. “Zeus?”

  “I’m here. Not sure where we should go with this,” Zeus said. “Give me a few minutes to think.”

  “Sebastian,” Ragno said, breaking one of the longest pauses he’d ever heard from her, “did she really say that her father’s instructions are for her to go to the President of the United States?”

  “You heard it as I did.”

  “How the hell was she planning to accomplish that? Was she going to stroll across the White House lawn and just walk through an open door? Current events aside, does she really think that’s how one gets in?”

  If he felt that he was getting closer to finding Richard Barrows, he’d have chuckled at the thought of Skye, Spring, and the dog going through the gates of Pennsylvania Avenue. But he didn’t have the reassuring feeling that came with getting close to his prey. In fact, now that Skye had finally spilled her guts, all he could do was wonder what the hell to do with the information. “I have no idea.”

  “We could have access, if we need it,” Ragno said.

  “I know,” he said. “But that would require us to play some mighty big cards, and we don’t call in those cards unless we’re certain of what we’re asking for, and equally certain of the results we’re going to get.”

  “In this situation it certainly wouldn’t be advisable,” Ragno said.

  “No joke,” he said, watching as the pilot shut the door to the cockpit.

  “I know. I’m just thinking aloud. Sorry, Sebastian,” Ragno said, “she got me with that one. Let me backup a minute. According to what she’s saying, the backup that was on Firefly Island provides access to Shadow and LID Technologies, and the person who has access will be able to manipulate the data collection capabilities of the U.S. government.”

  Sebastian glanced back to where Skye was sitting. The door that separated the compartments was open. His breath caught in his throat, when he got an eyeful of her. Skye had pulled her feet up on the seat and put her head down on her knees, hugging her legs to her chest. He ignored the tweak to his heart that her posture inspired.

  Dammit.

  He had to think about the implications of what she’d just told him. Not about her. If she was listening to his side of the conversation, she gave no indication. Just in case, he faced forward and dropped his voice to a whisper. “So can’t the government just shut it off? If Shadow Technology is actually running, and that’s a really big if, can’t they just shut it down?”

  “The programs are complex,” Ragno said, “it could take time. Skye is saying she has to alert the authorities to a breach. It seems that what she’s saying is that if someone has the code to the LID, their breach will be invisible. We now know that countries like China and other sophisticated hackers,” she paused, “like us, can get in and out without being detected. What Skye is telling us is that she needs to alert the President of the potential for a breach, and hand him the backup so he can stop it.”

  “Let’s assume that someone gets in. What’s the damage?”

  “Say China is behind this. If Shadow Technology does what Barrows says it does, China has now won the technological information war. Better than that, they now have the most intelligent data collection capabilities in the world. The U.S. government may be collecting everything, all the time, but all we’d be doing is handing it to China. The U.S. would have to regroup. It won’t force us back to the age before the Internet, but this technology breach could force us back into the nineties.”

  She paused. “Back when we were just collecting data, without an effective method of assimilating it. Remember? The clues to the September 11 attacks were all there. Richard Barrows is absolutely correct on that. The U.S. just wasn’t assimilating the clues,” she drew a deep breath, “which proves that endless information is not helpful knowledge. We don’t want other governments, or individuals, to have the tools that we use to turn information into knowledge.”

  “But you still think Shadow Technology and LID Technology do not exist, correct?” He silently debated which pain—headache or balls—was worse. The headache won. Tendrils of pain were shooting from his temple and forming an ice pick jab through his brain. He tried not to focus on the headache, thinking, instead, about the myriad of reasons why the jet might not be moving.

  “Well, if I listen to the governmental officials we’ve managed to talk to since Richard Barrows escaped,” she said, “I’d have to say that the technologies don’t exist.”

  “So Barrows has Skye planning on going to the White House, telling the President that there’s been a security breach on programs that might not even exist.”

  “That about sums it up,” Ragno said, “and without the backup, this could all be one great big show on the part of Barrows. To prove his point that the government was collecting data without proper safeguards in place.”

  “Unless the backup is in Charlotte.” Some of the throbbing in his head eased, but not because he really had any hope that the backup was in Charlotte. Thank God for drugs. Life was better with chemistry. “We’d at least know if these technologies exist.”

  “I’m not very hopeful we’ll find the backup,” she answered.

  �
��I’m betting no, and there’s no way I’m assuming that the backup—which we don’t have and likely won’t have—is what Richard Barrows led his daughter to believe that it was.”

  “Well, I’m not so sure I’d agree with you on that.”

  Cool. Calm. Unflappable. Ragno was all of that. Her simple statement stopped his runaway disbelief in its tracks. “Why?”

  “Because he didn’t lie.”

  “He believed in extraterrestrial life, for God’s sake.”

  “Well, have you proven that it doesn’t exist?”

  “Ragno, please don’t tell me you’re buying the man’s bullshit. You just said the technologies don’t exist-”

  “No. I said the government officials say that it doesn’t exist-”

  “But-”

  “Calm down, big man. I’m just saying that I don’t see a basis for believing that he’d lie about this. He was too passionate about it.”

  “Well,” he paused, remembering what Skye had said about the legions of people who wore foil-lined caps, “someone believes the man, because they’ve gone to great lengths to secure his backup.” He paused. “Say we buy into it all. We believe all of it. We go trucking up to the White House and tell the President our story. Does it help us find Richard Barrows?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “How?”

  “Because if Shadow and LID Technologies exist, and we know they’re being breached,” Ragno said, “meaning we believe Skye, and she is correct, and the President orders the NSA to let us have access, we can find the breach, and try like hell to diagnose who is doing it.”

  Zeus said, “By the way, I’m agreeing with Ragno so far.”

  Sebastian groaned. “This just got fucking worse. Are you two listening to yourselves? I’d rather tell the President that spacemen are coming. Imagine what will happen if the systems don’t exist.”

  “We will forever be the butt of jokes,” Ragno said.

  “Bad ones,” Zeus added. “And we won’t be anywhere close to finding Richard Barrows. Marshals are here, and Minero is calling me. I’m out for now.”